The mohawked pirate sounded surprised. Azure was surprised – three gigatons worth of explosions, and they weren’t even breached?!
“They built this ship tough,” Wong observed. “Ninety seconds to next salvo. Please tell me we’re targeting the launchers.”
“An entire salvo on its way, another launching shortly,” the gunner promised.
Leaving the battle in Wong’s capable hands, Azure turned back to the scan of the freighters and the pattern he’d noticed.
“Ship’s Mage,” he barked. He hadn’t actually learned which of the three was on duty. “Use the amplifier to scan this space,” he ordered, highlighting a region in the middle of the gaggle of fleeing starships.
A moment passed in silence.
“It’s there,” the Mage replied flatly. “That’s one hell of a thaumic signature – how come the sensors can’t see it?!”
“Because he’s shielding against those, and didn’t realize he’d stick out like a sore thumb to a Mage,” Azure told him calmly. “Montgomery’s a clever bastard. Wong – can he shield his jump signature?”
The Tracker faced the crime lord and shrugged. “Unlikely,” he told Azure. “A Mage remaining behind probably could, but I suspect he would like to leave with his ship.”
“Indeed,” Azure settled back in his chair. “Then once we have captured Darkport, he will be easy to pursue.”
Wong looked uncomfortable. Behind him, missiles exploded in space on the main screen as Darkport’s defenses began to shred the Gauntlet’s attack.
“That salvo hurt us,” he told Azure softly. “We’re down a sixth of our launchers – and we just got less than ten missiles through their defenses with full salvo.”
“Are you saying we can’t take Darkport?” the master of the Syndicate asked slowly, his voice cold.
“No,” Wong replied, his voice equally cold. “But we will have to close to amplifier range to do so now, which means we will get hurt by their missiles and lasers.
“If we take Darkport, my lord, we will not be in sufficient condition to pursue the Blue Jay,” the ex-bounty hunter laid out flatly.
“I recommend we wait until we have the scan of the Jay’s jump, and then jump out to our fall-back position. We will be able to make repairs and pursue your prey. We have three Jump Mages to their one – it will only take a few days at most to catch up and capture Montgomery.
“Then, with that bird in the hand, we can return and capture Darkport,” Wong concluded. “Every jump capable ship is in that flock of refugees. There will be no help for the Falcones – no reinforcements that can arrive before we return.”
“We can still have them both, my lord, but we must leave off the attack today.”
Azure turned away from his Captain, eyeing the asteroid ahead of them. Nine missiles had detonated on the rock’s surface, gouging massive chunks out of the planetoid and wiping away defensive weapons. Enough still remained that he believed Wong. If they took too much damage reducing Falcone’s defenses, they would lose the grand prize.
“Very well,” he replied. “But if we lose Montgomery, Wong…”
“We won’t.”
#
Damien struggled to maintain the cloaking spell. For the first time in a long time, it wasn’t his power that was the problem but his concentration. The spell wasn’t overly demanding in terms of energy and even his limited strength could handle it, but tracking all of the complex components of burying the Blue Jay’s energy signature in other ships took a lot of focus.
He’d had a moment of hope when he’d watched Darkport’s first missile salvo strike home, but when the radiation flare of the multiple antimatter explosions had faded, the massive Syndicate cruiser was still there, still advancing relentlessly on the station.
Around the Blue Jay, the other freighters were slowly beginning to scatter. Each of them had a different destination where they would try and lie low before rebuilding their business. Based off what he’d seen on Darkport, Damien couldn’t help but hope that most of them would fail and fall into Protectorate hands.
“Darkport is not winning this, Damien,” David said quietly over the bridge intercom. “Are we clear to jump yet? I don’t like anyone in this fight, but I’d like to be gone before Azure has time to hunt us.”
Still keeping most of his attention on the stealth spell, Damien checked the space around them. Were they this close to a planet, they wouldn’t have been able to, but Darkport had almost no gravity to warp the space flattened by the LaGrange Point.
For most civilian ships, a LaGrange Point wasn’t flat enough for jumping. Damien’s training suggested he had to be significantly further away from the gas giant than they were. With the amplifier, however, he should be able to push through.
“We’re clear.”
“Get us out of here,” David ordered.
Damien took a deep breath. Releasing the stealth spell, he reached for the magic of the amplifier again as quickly as he could, funneling it into the jump he’d prepared days earlier.
In a collapsing bubble of magic, the Blue Jay vanished from the center of the fleeing gaggle of freighters.
#
“There they go,” Hu reported, the scanner tech highlighting the sudden appearance and jump flare of the Blue Jay from the middle of the fleeing freighters. “Damn, he’s jumping in close.”
“He has a fully functional amplifier, and has had reason to learn his limits,” Wong said sharply. “Monroe, time to next salvo?”
“We’ll be loading and firing in thirty seconds,” the gunner replied. “Their next salvo is forty five seconds out.”
Darkport’s salvos were weakening as the Gauntlet destroyed their surface platforms, but the cruiser wasn’t invulnerable anymore either. Two more missiles had got through, detonating just clear of the warship’s hull and searing sensors and weapons from the surface.
“Jourdaine,” Wong snapped, turning to the Mage. “Jump us to the rendezvous point as soon as Monroe’s birds are in the air. We have enough holes to patch up!”
Azure remained impressed by the sheer survivability of the ship he’d stolen. Five one gigaton antimatter explosions had happened on or near the Azure Gauntlet’s hull, and while they’d lost weapons and surface emplacements, there was only one actual breach. Only fifteen of the cruiser’s crew were dead, about the same injured.
“Firing!” Monroe announced, and the ship lurched as another forty-plus missiles blasted away from her.
“Jumping!” Jourdaine snapped, and Azure shivered against the indescribable sensation of teleportation.
The screens blanked for a moment, and then returned with the image of deep space, a light year away from Darkport’s dead home system.
“Monroe, get on the repair crew – I want to know how many tubes and turrets we can get back online,” Wong ordered sharply. “Jourdaine, check in with the other Mages. Hu, go over the sensors – make sure we’ve got as much of the array working as we can. Once you’ve done that, send the data on the Jay’s jump to my office comp. You know what I need by now.”
As his bridge crew jumped into action around him, Wong turned back to Azure.
“My office, my lord?” he asked softly. “The less we hover, the sooner the ship will be repaired.”
Azure nodded and followed his ship captain into the small room tucked off of the bridge. The space set aside for the vessel’s commander had a viewscreen along one wall that duplicated the main screen outside.
“I apologize for my brusqueness, my lord,” Wong said after a moment, taking one of the two chairs in front of the desk.
“You command my ship, Mister Wong,” Azure replied calmly. “You have earned my trust in your judgment on this matter.”
He met his Captain’s gaze for a moment before Wong glanced away. Both messages heard and received.
“How long until we can pursue Rice and Montgomery?” he continued.
“I would like to take twelve hours to make sure we can finish most of the immed
iate repairs,” Wong told him after considering for a moment. “I don’t expect to get all sixty launchers back without a shipyard, but we should be able to get back over fifty.
“After that, we can pursue them with a jump every four hours,” the Captain finished. “If Montgomery thinks his little trick has concealed his path, he will likely hold to the standard three jumps a day. We will catch him inside two days.”
“You have three Mages qualified to jump,” Azure objected. “We can almost double that time.”
“If we had three true Jump Mages like Montgomery, yes,” Wong agreed. “If we had Fleet Mages aboard, they would easily be able to jump every six hours each. But finding Mages willing to serve on a pirate cruiser was not easy, my lord. Jourdaine is my only actual Jump Mage. The other two were too weak to qualify, which is how I got them aboard.
“They can jump. But neither can jump more than every twelve hours,” the Captain finished. “We can pursue far faster than the Blue Jay can run, but we must be aware of the limitations of our crew and vessel.”
“And once we bring them to bay?” Azure asked.
Wong shrugged. “Able’s plan was solid,” he admitted. “We are equipped with precision kinetics capable of severing the freighter’s ribs. My and Jourdaine’s analysis is that this will disable the amplifier and allow us to board.”
“We need the ship intact,” the Crime Lord warned.
“There is a risk of the Blue Jay’s destruction,” Wong told him with a nod. “But we can close to a little over two million kilometers – outside their amplifier range – which will minimize that danger. Unless they have heavily armed the ship, and I doubt they had enough time at Darkport for that, Montgomery will be no threat to us at that range.”
Azure considered the plan. He couldn’t see any way of reducing the risk of blowing away his prize without risking getting into a range where Montgomery would strike at the Azure Gauntlet with the amplifier.
For all that the ship had survived antimatter warheads meters from its surface; he doubted it would withstand a desperate Mage with an amplifier. There was, after all, a reason the Martian Navy tried to keep amplifiers out of the hands of anyone else.
“Very well, Mister Wong,” he allowed. “I am returning to my cabin. Advise me when we are ready to resume the pursuit.”
#
The mirror in the sealed room hidden beside Alaura Stealey’s main quarters glowed with starlight. The eight foot by three foot piece of glass was wrapped in a silver frame that was covered in meticulously carved runes, none of which would have appeared in a Martian Runic dictionary.
Across the room from the mirror, and taking up most of the space carved out of the Tides of Justice’s backup missile magazines, was a full scanner array that wouldn’t have looked out of place on the outside of the destroyer.
The magic running through the mirror and its frame allowed Stealey to open a window to a space many millions of kilometers away – almost exactly one light year, in fact.
Right now, the mirror was open onto the co-ordinates Captain Seule had given her for Darkport as her borrowed flotilla prepared for its jump.
A small holograph tank was set up against the only empty wall, showing a three dimensional image of the region the mirror was pulling radiation from. A dedicated computer core collated the data from the sensor array to produce an accurate image of a region of space a full light year away.
Darkport had clearly had better days. Even her unpracticed eye picked out the scars of recent explosions on the asteroid’s surface, and new debris fields scattered around the rock.
“Lady Hand,” Admiral Medici’s voice interrupted from her wrist PC. “The flotilla is preparing to jump. Would you care to join me on the flag bridge?”
The Tides of Justice had been built as a squadron command ship by the Navy – the additional communication and administrative equipment was part of why Alaura had ‘borrowed’ it – and had a small Flag Bridge. Medici, in the interests of not aggravating Castello’s ex-Flag Captain, had decided to use the Tides as his flagship.
She regarded the hologram for a moment. The situation was very different from what they expected, but not in a way that qualified as a threat. Certainly not enough of a threat to justify revealing the existence of the Star Mirror.
“I will be up momentarily, Admiral,” she told him calmly.
#
When the Tides of Justice erupted into Darkport’s otherwise empty system, the Seventh Cruiser Squadron was already there. Medici had sent the Rising Sun of Gallantry and its sister ships ahead to sweep for threats. Their sensor data began to feed into the Tides tactical computers as soon as the ship had stabilized from the jump spell, and a complete image of the system took form in front of the Hand and the Admiral.
“It looks like we’re a little late,” Medici observed as the battered state of Darkport came into view. “Though the radiation makes finding them easier.”
“We’re reading no ships in the system,” Lieutenant Harmon reported. Alaura’s aide had taken over the console on the flag bridge set up for a squadron tactical officer. Medici’s squadron tactical officer had been shuffled to a backup console, but they’d somehow fit everyone into the tiny room.
“It looks like some of the surface weapons platforms are still operational,” Harmon continued. “It’s hard to say how many there were, they’ve taken one hell of a pasting. CIC is estimating at least sixteen separate detonations.”
“Order the flotilla to advance on the station,” Medici ordered. “We’ll keep the cruisers forward – even if someone decides to be damned stupid, it doesn’t look like Darkport has enough launchers left to threaten a full cruiser squadron.”
Alaura activated a communication channel of her own, to one of the three Marine Assault Transports following at the rear of their formation.
“Brigadier Raphael,” she greeted the man whose image appeared promptly on her screen. Brigadier Michael Raphael was a bronze-skinned man with a shaven head, his skin color a sharp contrast with the stark white default mode of his battle exo-suit’s camouflage plating. “Status of your brigade?”
“Marines clean up after slavers, ma’am,” Raphael said bluntly. “I have twenty-four hundred boys and girls just itching to clean up the scum more directly.”
“It looks like you’ll get the chance,” she told him. “Azure appears to have beaten us here, so we’ll need to secure the station and establish if they have any information on where he or the Blue Jay left to. We’ll need them alive, Brigadier,” she warned cautiously.
Raphael nodded sharply.
“We know the rules of engagement, Lady Hand,” he promised. “Once we’re in, this is a police operation. Getting in though…”
“Lady Stealey,” Harmon interrupted. “We’re being hailed by Darkport.”
“Getting in may be easier than we hope, Brigadier,” Stealey told the Marine. “I’ll be in touch.” She turned to Harmon. “Put our erstwhile friends online.”
The flag bridge’s main screen switched from the exterior view to the image of a burly man with swarthy skin turned pale with stress. The image behind him was of some kind of control room, and smoke was visible in the air behind him.
“Protectorate forces, this is Julian Falcone of Darkport,” he said simply, his voice quiet. “I am requesting humanitarian assistance. Please respond.”
“Time delay?” Alaura asked.
“We’re on the cusp of missile range; call it forty five seconds each way.”
“Record for me,” she ordered and turned to the camera.
“Mister Falcone, this is Alaura Stealey, Hand of the Mage-King of Mars,” she informed him. “We both know what this station is and who you are. You’ll forgive me if I find a request for aid suspicious.”
A minute and a half passed and the flotilla slowly approached the station. At the current pace, it would take them just over hours to reach the station. They’d arrived outside missile range to be safe from the station’s weapons, but i
t made the approach, even at three gravities, frustratingly slow.
The return message opened with a firm, accepting, nod from the Mafia boss.
“My Lady Hand, you can see the damage done to the exterior of the station,” he said quietly. “We came under attack by Mikhail Azure in a stolen Navy cruiser, which I assume is the reason you are here.”
“The necessity of delivering supplies to generate oxygen required us to place most of this facilities oxygen generating capacity on the surface,” he continued. “We have recycling and scrubbing facilities in the asteroid, but it turned out that they were more vulnerable to electromagnetic pulses than we thought – as were the reserve generating plants inside the asteroid.”
“I have over a thousand wounded, and only four doctors,” Falcone admitted. “And unless we get additional air and manpower, a good third of the station is going to lose air before I can get anyone out. The rest of us will run out of air in three days.
“I know what you think of me, Lady Hand, but I have my own code,” he said firmly, looking directly into the camera. “These people are under my protection, and if I have to trade my freedom for their lives, that is a deal I am prepared to make.”
“I offer the complete surrender of the Darkport station, all databases intact, if you can save these people,” he concluded. “My current estimate is that we will need additional oxygen supplies either installed or dug into the aft third of the base within eight hours or people are going to start dying.”
The transmission ended, and Stealey looked over at Medici.
“Do you believe him?”
The tiny Admiral considered for a moment, and then nodded.
“His description of their issues is consistent with what I would expect to see,” he admitted. “Oxygen supply on a facility like that would be vulnerable, and the EMP from that many antimatter explosions would be devastating to even shielded items as fragile as oxygen processing systems.”
“Can we get there in time?” she asked. They were currently much further away than Falcone’s eight hour estimate.
Starship's Mage: Episode 5 Page 5
